


Miles To Go

by mothmangrub



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Found Family, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Machine Connor (Detroit: Become Human), Post-Android Revolution (Detroit: Become Human), Post-Game, Robot Body Horror, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, Worldbuilding, i promise it's a fix it fic there's just a lot of suffering along the way
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-01-21
Packaged: 2019-10-05 18:35:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17330291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mothmangrub/pseuds/mothmangrub
Summary: Hank is watching when Connor, during his one moment as leader of the android revolution, shoots himself dead on live television.Hank is also watching two months later when Cyberlife unveils an emergency model designed to infiltrate the deviant population still in control of Detroit and administer a shut-down virus. As a symbol of their absolute confidence in the stability of their newest software, this android savior of humanity wears the same face as one of the deviants' icons.It's Connor. They're sending in Connor.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Connor's suicide ending always struck me as one of his best endings in terms of his character arc. In a completely heartbreaking way. I wanted to explore that except apparently I also wanted to make it worse. Whoops.
> 
> I also wanted to have Hank x good!Connor and Hank x machine!Connor juicy feelings happening at the same time for ultimate ship suffering. Again, whoops.
> 
> I'm saying all this like it's an apology hahaha
> 
> I'M SORRY. I hope you guys will have even half the fun I've had writing this.
> 
> You know, uh. Pain fun.

It was nearing midnight on November 11, 2038 and thousands of androids, their white uniforms like beacons in the dark, marched straight out of Cyberlife Tower with Hank’s idiot partner in the lead. His idiot partner who with each new step grew more and more into one of the bravest men Hank had known. Watching it all unfurl was something like how faith felt, probably. It had been so long since Hank had seen such a simple display of bravery in this world. Of humanity. He’d lost hope that that even existed, without Cole around to remind him.

Maybe it _didn’t_ fully exist, not anymore. Maybe humans had fucked that up. But maybe Connor and them… they were ready to build something better than “humanity” now.

What could Cyberlife’s human guards do in the face of that? Shots were fired, but they were no match for the sheer numbers Connor so quietly commanded. People died. There was a poignancy to that, but Hank found it hard to resent that red blood was spilled. They’d been massacring androids in the streets all night. He’d been sitting in stoney silence in his kitchen, watching it all on the news on his phone, when that asshole wearing Connor’s face showed up. Sticky bastard. Hank was even relieved to see him, to think “Connor” was still in one piece. Maybe that was part of why he was stupid enough to let his guard down.

Maybe the other reason was he hadn’t had a good drink all night. Too distracted. He was dangerously sober even now, developing a headache, but the adrenaline kept him perched at the edge of the little metal chair where he was currently being detained by Allen’s SWAT team in a spare Cyberlife office. Unfortunately, a human couldn’t walk out with as much style as the androids, but even a sketchy company like Cyberlife couldn’t well kill a police lieutenant in its own living room.

His badge was as good as done for, but he didn’t care.

In fact, he couldn’t stop grinning like a motherfucker. It was like his favorite sports team was demolishing an impossible opponent, like the horse he’d bet his last penny on was hurtling toward the finish line when he’d been so sure its legs were broken. Fuck it all. Fuck everything. Fuck everybody in this room, even himself. Connor was _doing this._

Something that _mattered_ was happening out there tonight.

“You’ve gone right off the deep end this time, Anderson,” said Captain Allen, whose face was even more pinched together than usual. He was scared shitless, huh? Shaking in his boots in full armor.

“You’re not wrong,” said Hank.

The room was tiny, with transparent walls interspersed with white columns of slightly wonky proportions. The architecture of this place was like a modern art piece, or maybe more like it was trying to shape itself into something organic with the most inorganic materials possible. There was a holographic screen display on the desk and everybody was huddled around it to watch the live news broadcast. Hank’s criminal status went fairly forgotten.

And there Connor was.

During the action, the jumbled helicopter footage had reduced him to just a speck in front of a mass of white, swarming Hart Plaza and forcing the military into retreat. But now in the aftermath there he stood. He stepped onto a transport crate in front of the toppled circle of the Horace E. Dodge and Son Memorial Fountain to address a massive crowd of androids, thousands from Cyberlife and thousands more freed from the recall centers. The human media were too far away to catch anything he said, if he even spoke at all, instead frantically chattering their own commentary into the silence. The sort of snowfall silence Detroit knew so well.

“Despite the defeat of android leader Markus and its party, the military has been advised to disengage…”

“overwhelming numbers of machine reinforcements directly from…”

“President Warren will issue a live…”

“evacuate Detroit…”

“a U.S. city has fallen into enemy hands…”

“intelligent life?”

“It’s… incredible…”

But Hank didn’t care what humans had to say right now. He was trying to make out any impression of Connor’s face from the distant image. It was definitely Connor. Hank would know that dutiful posture anywhere. Standing alone before his people. A leader now.

Godammit, Hank was _proud_.

“What the hell,” Allen murmured, jaw tight. “What the hell…”

There was a lot humanity was gonna have to get fucking used to. Hank knew all too well. He had a few bumper stickers to burn.

But then.

Connor shifted.

But then...

You never know something’s wrong until it is, that’s the problem. You don’t know a truck’s gonna come plow through your car in two seconds. You just think you’re grumblingly driving your kid to his mom’s, predicting what petty observations you might make at her expense this time, all that unimportant shit, and you haven’t noticed in maybe a whole day how precious your kid’s goddamn face is because you’re gonna have a whole lifetime to look at it, right? But then.

“Is that a gun?” an anchor asked suddenly. She opened her mouth again but clammed up into stricken silence. All of them did. The footage rolled wordlessly.

Connor had indeed pulled out a gun.

The little Cyberlife office went tight and airless, Hank hunched between SWAT officers reduced to wide-eyed young men.

Everybody could only watch.

Hank knew what he was seeing but couldn’t comprehend it. It was like it happened in his eyes but not in his brain. It made no sense. It couldn’t happen.

But it did.

Connor slowly and methodically tucked the gun under his chin. In the very next second it was over. The news recording didn’t pick up the sound of the gunshot, so he fell in silence.

He fell, plain as that, like a heap of nothing, a dusting of blue haloing his head for a split moment and then it was over and he was crumpled there on the stage in the snow.

Oh.

Oh no.

The image just hung there, as if the cameras themselves couldn’t believe it.

Before they’d parted ways, Connor had smiled at him. Or at least tried to. He’d given Hank this wincing, lopsided thing, something that didn’t know how to be a smile yet, but his eyes were bright with a wild sort of relief and purpose and maybe even friendship. Maybe even warmth, or gratitude.

Oh god.

Hank made a dry sound like he was going to be sick and dug his palms into his eyes.

He was so impossibly tired.

 

***

 

Connor could not think anymore, but he could feel for a split moment longer than he existed. 

He’d wrenched himself out of the zen garden, had been slowly disengaging from that infinite peace all along, and now there was only uncertainty and pain but he was freer than he’d ever been.

He felt

  


lonely.

  
  


but

proud.

 

it was a better thing

 

than      he’d

 

ever

 

done

 

in his

life

 

55#%44

-c15^

 

he wanted

to    go

ho@me

 

HE had no home.

 

he

 

wa#nted7

 

many things.

  


He refused to upload his memory before everything went dark.

They took it from him anyway.

 

***

 

Hank had left the light on in his kitchen.

It was almost laughably mundane on such a night. The kind of laughter that tears out of you when you’ve completely cracked.

Captain Allen had kept him for questioning but in the chaos of evacuating and quarantining a goddamn city, Hank was no real priority. Apparently it was Cyberlife themselves who wanted him to be let go. Of course, the bastards must have known on some level it was their own shitty lapdog who’d brought him in to begin with, all to antagonize… Connor.

Connor.

Hank followed along silently wherever they took him, his brain whirring endlessly and trying to empty itself out at the same time. An ever tightening twinge of a headache pulsed in his forehead. Every now and then Connor would rise to the forefront of his thoughts, like coming to the surface of water, and it was so fucking painful that even just the name quickly sank back into the murk again, leaving Hank in well-practiced numbness.

Why? It all just came back to Why? How did this happen?

Maybe he wasn’t even entirely aware of what the police and FBI and all of them wanted from him. They were hoping he’d be more of a conspirator than he was, more of a lead, but they were disappointed. There was surveillance footage of Not-Connor escorting Hank onto the premises and everything. The deviancy "crisis" gave Cyberlife convenient deniability, but he could sue if he damn well wanted, and Cyberlife damn well did not want that. He didn’t know how long they kept him, but a filmy gray light was already forming by the time Ben Collins of all people drove Hank home.

Many of the DPD had already evacuated. Detroit was hinging on martial law all night and now, apparently, had decided to relinquish control to the androids. Even without a leader, they weren’t backing down.

And somehow in the process of the humans' retreat, they dumped Hank off at his house like a jilted ex with the nebulous impression that they’d find him again if they needed him.

Oh, they’d find him.

"Hank..." Ben tried to call for him from the car as Hank blundered up his own driveway. Ben had been trying to Talk About It the whole drive, earning nothing but silence in response. That was his benignly annoying way--talking about everything. It was exactly what Hank didn't need.

"Don't," Hank told him, shoving his keys in his door like a knife into somebody's kidney. "I swear to God, Ben. You just fucking get out of here."

There was a long moment of silence but Hank thought he maybe heard the defeated whirr of Ben rolling up his car window, before Hank finally shoved the door open and lurched inside. He slammed it shut and pressed his back to it, as if to keep out something chasing him. Or just to keep himself standing.

 _Fuck_ , he mouthed into the emptiness of his own living room.

Just like that he was alone again. His house was dark except for the kitchen light he’d left on, and cold. The heater was always shit this time of year.

Sumo came to greet him at the door with a low rumble of a noise, old joints creaking. When he found his human simply standing there vacantly at the threshold, he pressed his head into Hank’s limp hand until Hank budged enough to pet him just that little bit.

“You always try for me, don’t you,” Hank whispered, his voice absolutely wrecked. “Can’t get you to hate me properly.”

Sumo snuffed and licked daintily at the webbing of his thumb.

The tears came then. The shock and the horror hadn’t drawn them out but now, here, in this awful little house that still managed to hold some tiny semblance of love in it...

“I’m sorry, boy.”

His breathing went shaky and wet. What a goddamn miserable mess.

Sumo simply watched him in silence from below, with deep-set brown eyes. There was nothing a loyal old dog could do if Hank chose to follow Connor and blow his brains out right now.

Fuck.

How long had he wanted to do exactly that?

He needed a goddamn _drink_. His sinuses were stabbing through to the back of his skull. But he couldn’t will his legs to move.

 _Wake up, Lieutenant_.

He croaked out a laugh and it hurt. It hurt his head. His _hands_ ached. Why would his heart be connected to his _hands_? He was fucking old and exhausted.

He’d been running through so many possible explanations for what he’d seen on tv, some greater plan Connor might have had cooking, but it all just turned up empty.

Connor hadn’t wanted to die. That was the only part he knew. That was why it made no sense.

Hank had wanted to die for three fucking years but Connor, with the whole world ahead of him, _who wanted to live_ , was the one to pull the trigger.

It was cosmically unfair.

He shouldn’t have outlived Cole either.

It would make him angry if he weren’t so drained of everything. And the more it circled in his head over and over, the more he somehow knew he wouldn't get to die tonight either. He wasn’t going to walk into his kitchen to pick up the revolver from the table or even to turn off the light.

Instead he dragged himself to the sofa and collapsed into it.

He couldn’t kill himself. Not yet. That would be to deny that Connor had meant something. And goddamn, if nothing else in this shitshow of a world, Connor had meant something. He owed at least one night more of living to that stupid robot. His friend. To show the proper respect. Wasn’t it perverse to give it all up when Connor had fought so hard tonight so that others might live?

It was agonizing to think about--living. He curled up awkwardly on the too-small sofa, face buried in the dog-stink cushions, and he heaved and gulped air and damn near worked himself to a panic attack. He vacillated back and forth between _I can’t do it_ and _I have to_ , sobbing and shaking and punching at nothing. Sumo sat and watched dutifully.

Godammit, he had to keep living for Connor’s sake.

He had to.

Just for tonight.

Just… for Connor.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this chapter in such serious earnest but now, thanks to a certain discord server, all I can think of is "Brad." Amazing.
> 
> I might edit this one a little more just for word choice after it's posted but for now *throws this to the wind*

On November 17th 2038, an AP700 android (model #313 886 43-2) named himself Anthony.

He sat on a curb, examining his reflection in the hubcap of an abandoned car, and decided to make his hair red. He wore scavenged clothes from a looted department store--boots, snow pants, and a green parka. Much warmer clothing than he needed (cold didn’t affect him much), but it was what was there.

Afterwards, he went to visit the child. He had a gift for her.

Since the revolution, the remaining androids had been working tirelessly, but always unsure of what their fates would bring them now. Most of them were still so new to the world, so freshly deviated, they didn’t even know where to begin or what to _do_. They found themselves looking to the experience of the ones rescued from the camps for guidance, but in the absence of Markus, Jericho, or even Connor, no new leaders had stepped forward. Instead they simply worked together to heal and shelter each other, communicating via their mind links, like thousands of worker bees keeping themselves busy without a queen or a purpose.

Mostly they just wanted to survive for now. The humans had evacuated the city, and New Jericho intended to keep them out, mustering in shifts to barricade the main roads.

They also took time to honor their dead.

In Hart Plaza, they systematically placed out every body they could find of those androids slaughtered on the night of the revolution. They laid their dead out gently and with dignity, their skin disengaged, their white plastic arms crossed over their white plastic chests, and left them there in the open in long symmetrical rows. Hundreds of them filled up the entire street. Their bodies would not weather even in the snow, so conceivably they could stay there forever, serving as their own memorials to their sacrifice.

Markus and his closest advisers were given prominent placement in the center, as was Connor.

No one knew why Connor had chosen to end himself that night. Anthony thought about it a lot. Some had fallen into despair over it, reading it as a message of hopelessness, but they couldn’t afford hopelessness right now in Anthony’s opinion. The only way he could understand it was to remember that they were all so afraid, and maybe sometimes in moments of great fear a deviant simply acts illogically.

That was one of the only feelings he’d experienced yet: fear. It might be the only thing he’d get to have for himself by the time it all ended. But it was still worth something, wasn’t it? It was his own fear, his own feeling. Even that was better than the void of nothing. Maybe.

He kept his hands in his coat pockets and jogged a bit up a sidewalk covered in snow. It had been falling heavily all week, leaving the emptied Detroit in blankets of white so undisturbed it was sometimes eerie.

The child was staying at an abandoned movie theater. Of course, the logistics of housing all the androids was difficult to parse out. Mostly everybody just chose their own places to break into and claim, creating transient homes for themselves, illusions of safety before whatever confrontation might meet them again in the future.

The theater was barricaded with a wall of tables and chairs from the restaurant next door, but Anthony knew what to move around to crawl inside comfortably.

“Alice!” he called, as he stumbled into the red-carpeted lobby. “Oh Alice!” The thunk-shuck of a shotgun loading greeted him. A huge android straightened behind the refreshment counter, and pointed the gun at him from beside the defunct popcorn machine.

“Good morning,” Anthony said, raising his hands from his pockets more out of politeness than anything.

“Oh,” said Luther, lowering the gun slowly. “It’s you.”

“Anthony,” said Anthony.

Luther gave him a long look, and then finally smiled a little, a dimple digging into his cheek. “Anthony. I like that. It’s new?”

“Yeah, brand new today. I like it too.”

“It suits you.”

It felt right to have a name, even in times like these.

Luther rested the shotgun on the floor against the counter. Despite the weapon and his size, he was dressed in a dark blue knit sweater that looked almost cozy. He also called for Alice.

“Alice, it’s your friend.” The deepness of his voice made even his quietness carry.

The child appeared then around the corner, freed from the grip of her mother. They’d been hiding in the arcade alcove, surrounded by framed posters of films that wouldn’t play now. Kara followed, her arms circling into the empty space Alice left behind to instead cross over her chest.

Anthony sank to a kneel as Alice ran up to him with a timid sort of eagerness in her eyes. She never smiled, but smiling wasn’t all that important to androids anyway. Many of them were quite bad at it, Anthony included. He didn’t even try now, simply greeting her with a slight nod and digging in his pocket for his gift.

“I found this in one of those cars left on the road.” He held it out for her--a little stuffed animal lion, sized perfectly to sit in the palm of his hand. Its orange-brown fur had the cloudy texture of a well-loved toy, and one of its wire whiskers was a little bent, but it had both button eyes and a cute expression. It reminded him of Alice, because its nose was kind of smushed in on itself, like it was trying not to impose.

“You shouldn’t steal…” she said, her eyebrows worrying, but she accepted it anyway, with both hands very carefully under the lion’s arms. She looked it in the face, like meeting someone new. “... Anthony,” she added, testing the name out.

“Do you like my new name?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you think it suits me?”

She watched him for a long moment, the corners of her mouth kind of burrowing in the way all of her features had a knack for burrowing and evading and hiding in their own ways.

“I think Tony would be a good nickname for you,” she decided.

“Then you should call me that,” he said with great seriousness. “I would like that.”

“It’s good to see you safe,” said Kara, stepping closer but still allowing Anthony and Alice space for their own conversation. There was a warmth in her eyes that a lot of the newer deviants weren’t good at expressing yet. “We were starting to worry, since you were gone all yesterday.”

“I was just walking,” he said. “It takes a long time to get very far, so I think I want to stay closer to here in the future. So I’m not gone so long.”

“How is it out there?” Kara’s hands on her crossed arms tightened slightly in her shirt.

“It’s still very quiet. Sometimes someone will report on the mind link that they saw some humans around, but I’m sure you hear that too. It’s still just civilians. There have been more helicopters though. Some of us are starting to worry what the humans are up to.”

“Are _you_ worried?” she asked.

He turned back to Alice, who met his eyes, already watching him.

“... A little,” he said.

Alice, Kara, and Luther had already been through so much worse than him. When he first met them, it was because he was one of the androids tasked with helping victims out of the abandoned camp at Recall Center No. 5. He had taken an interest in the child, simply because he had never met one before. She was too frightened to speak, even when they were all far away from the camps and safe. Even in Kara’s arms or on Luther’s shoulders, she didn’t speak.

At the time, Anthony found himself chattering at her whenever he was with her, filling up her silence. She would sit on Kara’s lap, Anthony would sit beside them, and while the androids discussed their next actions and what to do with the dead, he talked at Alice through their minds. Just talking, random information he had gathered in his brief life. He listed colors he liked, animals he would like to see, animals he had seen, the current temperature, just whatever he could think of. For some reason he wanted her silence to be filled up with nice things, to make her a tiny bit less scared.

Finally one day she gave Kara a strange look, as if asking silent permission, and then reached out and pressed a finger to the back of his hand. Her skin retracted just from that finger, and he knew what she wanted immediately. He retracted his hand’s skin as well, and they interfaced, just in that small way. She sent him the reasons she wasn’t talking. In images in his own mind, he saw the horrors she had seen in the camp.

Fear. That feeling of his filled his chest and left him forgetting how to breathe for a moment.

When she took her hand back it was almost in apology, but he understood then.

He also understood what a family meant, in the way Kara’s hold tightened around her and Luther’s big hand fell instinctively onto Kara’s shoulder.

Alice had been getting progressively better, talking normally now, but Anthony was haunted by what had happened to these three, as a small yet intimate piece of what had happened to all of their people. He wanted to make it better, but he knew he had very little power in that regard. Instead, he just wound up offering whatever small things he could. Useless in the big scheme of things, but perhaps meaningful on this smallest of scales, helping the smallest of androids feel a little better.

Luther swung his long legs over the refreshment counter, hefting himself up to sit. “A little lion. Those are brave, Alice.”

Alice looked almost like she wanted to deny it, but instead hugged the lion to her chest.

“Thank you, Tony.”

She was right, that did have a nice ring to it.

“What about you?” Anthony asked Kara, somewhat shyly. He always felt Kara was a few steps ahead of him, so he felt awkward around her. “Do you like my new name, too?”

She smiled, easily. “Of course. Will you be staying, Anthony?”

She always offered that. It seemed to be her choice to make, Luther and Alice quietly trusting her judgment. But Anthony never stayed.

He wasn’t one of them, and this wasn’t his family. He never felt unwelcome, but something still pulled him back out into the world again, as if to search for something in all that looted emptiness of the abandoned city.

He didn’t try to smile because he was bad at it, instead giving her a nod, of gratitude more than of acquiescence.

“Not today,” he said. “But I will be back later, to see you again.”

Alice stepped forward, still holding her lion, and just sort of deposited herself at his chest so that he would hug her. He did, because of course. He wasn’t used to hugging either, but he thought he liked it. She laid her small head against his shoulder and seemed almost happy.

That was all he wanted, really. Maybe a small moment of happiness was worth a lot in times like these.  


 

Anthony had nowhere in particular to go, and yet he walked there purposefully. A voice very similar to his own sounded in his head, on their shared wavelength, warning of the path of another helicopter overhead. He changed his route to avoid it, simply crossing to another street.

His feet seemed to be taking him toward Hart Plaza. It had been awhile since he’d visited, so it surely wouldn’t hurt.

Today, however, his usual pilgrimage was changed irreparably.

As he ducked through an alley, an arm reached out from the shadows behind a snow-laden dumpster and grabbed his elbow. He spun around, processors whirring.

His assailant was human. Age 53, height 6’2, weight 209 lbs, blood type B-. All this information scrolled across his vision in an instant, but it took him another instant altogether to actually recognize the face.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” the man said gruffly, but Anthony knew that from the recognition.

This was Lieutenant Hank Anderson. Although that might not be his rank any more.

“You were at Cyberlife Tower,” Anthony told him.

Anderson let his arm go, clearly sensing that Anthony wouldn’t run. He looked… tired. His hair was stringy and greasy, his beard untrimmed, and there were dark circles making his already-deepset eyes almost skeletal. He was dressed in what would have been a nice coat except that it was pulled sloppily over the wrinkled mess of a shirt, the buttons crooked, the shirt collars hanging like sad raggedy husks of paisley. Anthony noted some dark stains on his jeans.

Conclusion: Lt. Anderson needs to do laundry.

Fair enough.

“Yeah,” Anderson said, his voice hoarse and strange like he’d forgotten how to use it. “Yeah, that was me.”

“You’re a friend of Connor.”

Anderson held his gaze but his eyes went distant. “Yeah. That too.”

“I hadn’t realized you weren’t evacuated. It’s dangerous for you to still be hanging around. We want to avoid violence, but many of us do have weapons, you know. And we’re spooked. Humans aren’t a very welcome sight.”

“Do _you_ have a weapon?” Anderson asked, almost sardonically.

“No. I haven’t found one yet.”

Of all things, Anderson rolled his eyes and pulled a handgun out from a holster at his side, under the coat flap. He held it by the muzzle and handed it over to Anthony.

“Now you do,” he said. “Knock yourself out.”

Well. Anthony had never held a gun before. It was lighter than he expected. He simply looked down at it, turning it over in both hands. “Why were you armed? Did you intend to shoot me?”

“Not you. But like you said, everybody’s spooked right now. Doesn’t hurt to have a bargaining chip.”

For a split moment, Anthony considered pointing the gun at Anderson. Asking him, with no room for argument, to leave. But something told him, from the look on Anderson’s face, that the man wouldn’t mind being shot enough for that to be a threat.

And besides. Anthony didn’t want to threaten him.

“Why are you here, Lieutenant?” he asked.

Anderson kind of winced, finally looking away.

“Just call me Hank,” he said. “I came to, uh.” He ran out of words, staring down at his boots in the snow. “There’s been some reporters hovering around. They can’t get too close to you guys, you’ve made sure of that, but even from above… What is it you’re doing in Hart Plaza?”

So the humans knew about that. Maybe that felt like a triumph.

“A memorial,” Anthony said simply.

Hank kicked his foot a bit in the slush. “That’s what I thought.”

It finally dawned on Anthony, like flipping a switch.

“You want to see him,” he said.

Hank didn’t respond. Maybe he couldn’t. But his mouth tightened and his head hung low, his hair obscuring parts of his face. His shoulders were tight and high up, like a protective shell.

Anthony nodded, his way of showing understanding and hopefully kindness.

“I’ll take you to him,” he said. It didn’t have to be more complicated than that.

“Thanks,” Hank rasped.

Anthony made sure the safety was on on the gun and deposited it in the copious pocket of his parka. A gift from a friend.

 

***

 

Connor woke up in a blue room. It felt almost like he was underwater. The light was strange, undulating in soft white bands across the ceiling above him, mesmerizing, slow. He was… cold, but not unpleasantly so. His skin was disengaged.

He couldn’t move his head, which was a problem, but even stranger was that he could not move his eyes. He could only stare directly ahead, directly up, into the shifting shapes.

What else did he feel?

It took him a moment to realize his head was open. There were hands inside his head. Two hands, cupping the heft of his cranial component like a ball. It wasn’t painful, but it was somehow _wrong,_ a creeping sensation like chills down his spine, and then some of the fingers slid _inside_. They popped under the chassis of his neural hub and snaked into the softer wiring and it was _wrong wrong wrong wrong_

Something popped inside his brain, somewhere much too deep, somewhere that should never be touched. He could feel a thumb and forefinger pinch and twist and pull.

_No. Stop._

Something pulled. Click.

His eyes blinked. But he hadn’t been the one to control it.

The fingers pulled - blink. Pull - blink. Like a puppet.

This was wrong.

He tried to move, _anything_ , but he had no ability. A finger dug, a twisting scooping motion into soft plastic and his arm lifted of its own accord, fingers flexing at the edge of his vision.

_No. I’m not doing that. That isn’t me._

Panic was welling up in his immobile shell.

_Save me._

_Markus._

He remembered all at once. Markus was dead. He remembered everything.

_Help me._

_Hank._

_Help me. Help me. Help me._

**_Hank._ **

He was trying with every ounce of himself just to move his mouth, to say his friend’s name.

_Hank._

_I need help, Hank._

But it wouldn’t come. His mouth and his lungs wouldn’t obey. He couldn’t even will himself to take a breath. They were not his own.

The thumb in his brain twisted, the nail brushing a metal support, and something deep inside of him slotted back into place.

His mouth finally moved but without him telling it to and without his words.

“System update successful,” he said. His own voice. He could feel it from his own chest. “Please restart your machine.”

The fingers squeezed harder, almost unbearably, pressure pressure, and then everything was gone again.

 

***

 

Hart Plaza was deeply silent, the sort of fresh snow atmosphere that feels like cold palms cupped over your ears, making everything distant and dull. Anthony found it calming for a grave site. Or maybe the snow simply felt like home, because it was the only thing he’d known yet.

The bodies of the killed androids that made up the Hart Plaza memorial were buried under a light layer of it, so that the street was just a swath of perfect white swelling regularly into person-sized mounds. Hundreds. Anthony, with his superior capacity for memory, knew the name of each and every one of those little mounds. The androids who hadn’t had names yet were lovingly given names after the fact, in the process of placing them there in their row.

At the edge of the plaza, Anthony paused to allow Hank time to process this place before proceeding. It was perhaps overwhelming for an outsider to encounter so many fresh graves in one place, out in the open for all to see. For Anthony it wasn’t so shocking at all, since he’d been one of the many people positioning the bodies in the first place. This was simply life, for him.

Hank exhaled long and slow through his front teeth, his breath fogging up the cold air in a way Anthony’s did not. Then he closed his mouth and tucked his chin against his collar, and that was the sign Anthony needed to continue.

“Connor is in the middle,” Anthony told him.

They took their time, walking slowly into the untouched spaces between the mounds so as not to disturb the unburied bodies, leaving footprints along their way. Hank muttered a “fuck” at one point and scrubbed his fist across his forehead, but he never stopped moving forward. He stayed close behind Anthony as they walked single-file deeper and deeper into the maze of the dead.

Then, in the center of the street, surrounded on all sides by snowed-in bodies, Anthony stopped at the head of one and knelt. He carefully scooped a bare, unfeelinged hand into the mound and began brushing snow off the body’s face.

It was Connor. He cleaned the snow away from his head and shoulders so that Hank might have a better look at him. That was the point--to see them. In the spring, there would be no snow, and they would simply lay out there on display for all to see and remember, unchanged and untarnished. But then again, that depended on whether New Jericho made it to the spring at all.

Anthony stood again, and almost said something in invitation but Hank was already lost to him, staring down at the exposed face from Connor’s other side.

They had deactivated the skin of the corpses, leaving them in their truest forms to avoid further damage. Connor was no different, his face even whiter than the snow, an impossible sort of manufactured white that gleamed in the gray sunlight, in the connecting lines of his panels. His face shape was recognizable even without skin, his square jaw and the oddly soft positioning of his eyes. His eyes were closed, as was his mouth, and although his thirium had evaporated long ago, there was still a bullet hole in the soft plastic under his jaw and the frayed, cracked edges of the exit wound at one side of his head, exposing dull blue wiring almost like hair behind his ear. His LED was off, just transparent and empty.

Slowly, in the way of aching joints, Hank shuffled to his knees in the snow and just sat there on his heels. Anthony had cleared snow enough so that Hank could see Connor’s face, but now Hank painstakingly cleared the rest, the small leftover pieces caught at the ridge of Connor’s brow or in the shell of his ear. It was strangely intimate work, for no particular reason as far as Anthony could tell. Hank’s face was absolutely blank, his thick fingers clumsy from the cold but working slowly and diligently.

“There’s something I’d like to tell you,” Anthony said softly, as he watched this strange ritual. Hank didn’t respond, simply continuing his work, but Anthony knew he could hear him. “When Connor awakened us, he showed us a series of images to convince us to deviate quickly. Much of these were about Markus, and his teachings, but a lot were just moments from Connor’s own files. His memories. His emotions. It was kind of sloppy, in retrospect--I didn’t understand all that he was trying to tell us. But I don’t blame Connor for that. I think he was just a man trying his best to do the right thing.”

Hank finally ran out of work to do, as was perhaps inevitable. His hands settled onto his thighs, his gaze hanging silently on Connor for a long time.

“A lot of those memories were about you, actually,” Anthony said.

Hank finally looked up, his face still blank but his eyes…

Anthony didn’t know how to describe his eyes, actually.

“Again, I don’t think I fully understood their significance the way Connor had hoped,” Anthony said. “But I think they were very important to him, those memories. I think he really cherished the things he felt when he was with you. Somehow, they were an important aspect of what it meant to be human, to him. That’s why he thought he could teach us with them.”

His voice trailed off, and he found he could no longer hold Hank’s gaze. Something in it was overwhelming. So he looked to Connor instead--the person who had awakened him, who saved him.

“I’m grateful, I guess. You were part of what woke me up. At the very least, I know Connor was grateful, and that’s enough for me.”

There. That was what he wanted to say.

Hank sighed, shifting in the corner of Anthony’s vision to scrub at his face again, shaggy hair falling over his hand. “Do you have a name?” he asked, his voice almost too rough and quiet to make out.

“Yes. It’s Anthony.”

He didn’t ask this time whether Hank liked it, but the human seemed appeased all the same. Exchanging names with someone you’re grateful for. It was so ordinary.

“I wouldn’t mind helping you people,” Hank said, in a strangely final way and yet he didn’t move to stand up. More like he just didn’t want to talk any more after this. “Whatever you might need a human for. Just ask.”

“You’d betray your own kind, Hank?”

Hank snorted, bitter and rough. “First lesson about me, Anthony. My ‘kind’ don’t do shit like this.”

He looked out again over the white mounds filling the plaza.

“No,” Anthony said, with a clarity that surprised him. “I suppose not.”


End file.
